Bristol streetlamps to become time-travelling shadowmakers

There's something distinctly Peter Pan-esque about the winner of
the 2014 Playable City award. When the Sun sets on Bristol this
September and the orange glow of its streetlights flicker into
life, people may find their shadows wandering around without
them.

Shadowing, a
project developed by Jonathan Chomko and Matthew Rosier, uses
infrared tracking and triggered projections to replay the shadow of
a previous passerby to the next person who walks under a modified
streetlight. The design duo hopes that the reanimation of the city
streets with ghostly time-travellers will be a playful experience
for everyone, but also recognises the potentially darker side of
the shadows.

"We had a few people in the feedback process provide, not
criticisms really, but they might be scared of the idea," Jonathan Chomko, an
interaction designer from Toronto, told Wired.co.uk. "Will this be
fun or will this be scary? We're looking at adding things to make
our intentions more obvious, like the shadow of a cat or some extra
element to encourage the playfulness. There's a lot of functions we
need to test to see how we can encourage the sort of experience we
are imagining."

Matthew Rosier

The two envision an augmentation to the city that allows people
to playfully express themselves to others whom they will likely
never meet. They hope this will range from people leaving attempted
greetings to future visitors, or simply noticing the installation
and experimenting with it themselves.

"We figured that using the actual contour of the body would be
good as that input allows for a lot of different types of
interaction, and not a lot of censorship can be done -- or is
needed -- on actions through shadows," Chomko told us. "People can
use it to leave a greeting for someone else. And when they learn
how the lamp works, people [returning] to play with their own
shadow. People [becoming] aware that this is a little time
capsule.

"It's kind of a thing where people can leave something for
future people, like in America we have this concept, take a penny,
leave a penny. It's kind of like paying it forward to the next
guy."

Chomko's partner, Matthew
Rosier, a British designer based out of Treviso, Italy, spoke
of the specific benefit this kind of interactive play could have to
British audiences, especially those in cities. "This can be a
bridge between people, particularly British people, who have a
difficult time interacting with strangers. It could provoke
interactions with people who tend not to look up ever when they're
walking, or talk with anyone else because it's a city. There's lots
of opportunity to see how people use it."

Matthew Rosier

The installation itself has not been finalised yet, there are
multiple methods the two are looking at using to bring the streets
to life. "We wanted something that was a plug-in, rather than an
add-on, to the city. Something integrated, rather than just to
force people to use a screen," Chomko said. "Then we eventually
just hijacked a street lamp, we had this vision of how we could use
the space in the city to augment, and bring a human presence to
places where there wasn't always a presence, rather than places
where people can see themselves on a screen or whatever." The
methods they have decided on range from placing an LCD display
over an existing streetlight to cast a shadow in time with
information captured by the IR sensors, or simply replacing the
bulb with a projector to do the same.

The project's dependence on light does pose some unique problems
to the designers, however. "With it only working at night we're a
bit worried about families with kids getting a chance to use it, so
we're looking at putting it in places where it's always dark, or an
interior place or under a bridge or something," Chomko told us. "I
like the idea that people can work together so they can create
shadows, so there's that aspect of cooperative play as well. These
won't be in areas of high foot traffic, not in a busy square or
anything, so it could work well with that."

There are many more features the two hope to implement before
Shadowing unveils itself to the Bristolian public on 10 September,
including the possibility of moving shadows around the city, using
each street lamp as a sort of portal to another place. The city's
shadows will come to life for six weeks before the tech moves on to
other cities around Europe.